Lately there’s also been quite a bit of (hysterical, climate-ambulance chasing) talk about the regional heat waves and “extreme” weather that have hit parts of the northern hemisphere. Obviously they’ve been ignoring the huge cold developments at places they used to like focusing on.

At PBS activist/alarmist scientist Michael Mann attributes it to manmade climate change. However, expert meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue differs, tweeting here that the factor behind it all hasn’t been behaving unusual at all:

Interesting, climate scientist Michael Mann attributes the last month of extreme weather to a “slow”, “more wild” and “undulating” jet stream. But that’s typical of “summer” in Northern Hemisphere regardless of climate change.

I see, Pierre wants to write about 10 years old failed predictions of other people, but not his own failed predictions … well, Mr. Cold climate „ambulance chaser“, just be careful who you call goofying around 🙂

mwhite:
I hope they realise that the Canadian Coast Guard announced recently that those Climate Fools attempting the NW Passage (because according to the dogma it should be ice free by now) would have to pay for the costs of rescue.

There have been statements that fires are attributable to global warming.
We do know, however, that air temperature never gets hot enough to ignite a fire.
The real issues are two:
a. fuel buildup over many years of active fire suppression, and
b. people and/or their inadvertent actions produce the “spark”

In the USA, about 84% of wildfires involve a human component. For example, near us last week a truck caught fire and the driver pulled to the side of the road — into dry grass. The fire was between two nearby towns, so was controlled quickly. Some get away before firefighters arrive.

Sorry, seb, but you looked as if that’s what you were saying. You need to write simply rather than try to be “clever”. You don’t have the qualifications.

But I’ll keep it simple. Fires are not caused by atmospheric temperature. They are caused by sparks, sun shining through glass that has been carelessly left around, by lightning, by human activity — legal, illegal, or just plain careless.

If you have any evidence of spontaneous combustion in plants, we’d love to hear about them.

Did you know that the commonest time of year for wildfires is Spring? Followed by Autumn?

Deeply packed moist leaves begin decaying, and the temperature generated by the rotting vegetation can sometimes reach ignition. If there are other combustibles nearby, and they catch fire, then it spreads.

In Jr. High our science teacher demonstrated how water in a test tube could focus sunlight. He focused it on one of the window shades, which almost immediately began to smoke. He quickly removed the lens before the shade burst into flames (but not before a burn mark was left). Whew! Close call, teach.

There used to be public service announcements on TV many years ago to educate people, in the hopes of minimizing the fire risk from yard debris/compost piles and oily rags, etc.

But air temps alone are never sufficient. Of course, if the [O2] of our atmosphere were higher, that might not be the case, not from the heat of the atmosphere but because Oxygen is so very reactive.

Your “basics” seem to be that 0.08ºC ocean warming over 55 years is enough to melt huge glaciers (but active volcanoes below that glacier have zero effect), and that air temperatures of 40ºC cause bush fire to ignite.

Seems that your “basics” should be subjected to a massive revision/education…. away from the kindy level they are currently at.

John, you are arguing against global warming being responsible for wild fires with the required temperature to ignite stuff.

Interestingly, your side claims that a 1 degree Celsius air temperature increase causes 600 percent more burned area. So while it’s not claimed to actually ignite a fire, it’s claimed that air temperature increases of just 1 degree cause more burns and more areas burned.

There’s one crucial detail overlooked in your ‘calculations’, namely the fact that -to name an example- when I was born there were ~300 billion (yes, 9 zeros) more trees than there are now. And I’m only age 52. And still, at today’s rate; for every new human born about 100 trees disappear from earth to not be replenished or replanted elsewhere. Those are even low estimates, according to most who’ve done counts. Let’s take that 1 example. The lack of sufficient tree-cover alone, globally, makes up for at least 2 degrees Celsius warming at the land surface level for the past 50 years. The fact that we haven’t observed those 2 degrees is most likely influenced by added pollution (i.e. global dimming) and lowering solar output during that same time.

Tree cover is an enormous influence on surface T. Plus very sensitive to becoming feedback loops in changing climates; They can’t migrate at the required growth speed for survival, each migratory process is either coincidence, man-made or by evolutionary drivers. They go down faster when soil is dry, when storms are stronger, when extreme Ts make them less resistant to disease, older trees now die younger, so the CO2 intake is highly impacted by the lower leaf-count, and all are -obviously- feedbacks galore.

Are you certain you have included all that in your remarks about the rise in wildfires due to T rise? I don’t see it.

While I thought it was self explanatory, I’ll repeat: Your side believes that a change in atmospheric temperature of 1 degree causes a 600% increase in the area burned during forest fires. Do you believe this claim is based upon observational evidence? Do you have any skepticism about its accuracy?

In the United States, 84% of wildfires are (in some way) related to the activities of people. People activities provide the ignition. Fires close to housing, towns, other structures are fought immediately and aggressively.
Fires that get started in uninhabited areas where there is a huge fuel load will often become mega-fires.https://www.north40productions.com/eom-home

Firefighters try to protect structures, but otherwise mostly get out of the way.
Because of past forest management, big fires are in our future regardless of whether the temperature goes up or down.

And no, the atmosphere is NOT anything like an actual greenhouse. That is the first BIG ERROR in the whole AGW scam.

Nothing blocks convection or conduction which are the main controls of the lower atmosphere, governed by the gravity/pressure/thermal gradient. H2O is the only molecule that modifies thatgradient, because of its differnet phases and latent energy.

The radiative greenhouse effect ie warming by the radiative effects of greenhouse gasses, has never been measured on this planet or any other planet.

I’ll refer you to that Carbonbrief link too … it’s all double counted unreliable data. And you should never rule out the better tech that is available now to fight fires and detect them earlier.

Spikey,

What weird arguments are those seb?

That temperature doesn’t cause fire ignition?

That’s the only argument I can see being made.

Do you have any counter evidence?

You said…“with the required temperature to ignite stuff”

What atmospheric temperature makes bush fires ignite, seb?

You must be really slow. Your side’s argument against global warming is that the temperature is not high enough to ignite a fire. You don’t seem to recognize how weird of an argument that is and on top seem to think that I am arguing against that or something … who knows why.

John,

In the United States, 84% of wildfires are (in some way) related to the activities of people.

That is not the point. The point is that you try to argue with temperatures not being high enough to ignite a fire and because of this global warming can’t cause more and larger burned areas. If you can’t see the problem with this line of argument, well … I am guessing you need to be in a certain state of mind to become this kind of “skeptic”.

Yonason,

but the fact remains that CO2 has increased, and fires and burned areas have decreased.

Not in the timespan where reliable data exists. I find it fascinating that you have no problem with unreliable data when it somehow supports your agenda, but when it doesn’t you claim to be a skeptic. Very flexible you are 😉

So when I ask for observational evidence to support your beliefs that CO2 rise causes more wildfires, you provide a link to carbonbrief.org? It’s no wonder why your reputation here is so severely compromised. You make claims that are unsupportable, and then when asked to support your claims anyway, you provide links to blogscience.
————————————-http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1696/20150345“Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends. Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago. Regarding fire severity, limited data are available. For the western USA, they indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement. Direct fatalities from fire and economic losses also show no clear trends over the past three decades. Trends in indirect impacts, such as health problems from smoke or disruption to social functioning, remain insufficiently quantified to be examined. Global predictions for increased fire under a warming climate highlight the already urgent need for a more sustainable coexistence with fire. The data evaluation presented here aims to contribute to this by reducing misconceptions and facilitating a more informed understanding of the realities of global fire.”
–http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/09/1112839109“Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare this record to independent fire-history data from historical records and fire scars.There has been a slight decline in burning over the past 3,000 y, with the lowest levels attained during the 20th century and during the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1400–1700 CE [Common Era]). Prominent peaks in forest fires occurred during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (ca. 950–1250 CE) and during the 1800s. Analysis of climate reconstructions beginning from 500 CE and population data show that temperature and drought predict changes in biomass burning up to the late 1800s CE. Since the late 1800s , human activities and the ecological effects of recent high fire activity caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the LIA fire decline. Consequently, there is now a forest “fire deficit” in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.”
–http://hol.sagepub.com/content/3/3/255.short“Although an increasing frequency of forest fires has been suggested as a consequence of global warming, there are no empirical data that have shown a climatically driven change in fire frequency since the warming that has followed the end of the ‘Little Ice Age’. We present here evidence from fire and tree-ring chronologies that the post-‘Little Ice Age’ climate change has profoundly decreased the frequency of fires in the northwestern Québec boreal forest. A 300-year fire history (AD 1688-1988) from the Lake Duparquet area (48°28′ N, 79°17′ W) shows an important decrease, starting 100 years ago, in the number and the extent of fires. … The contradictory results between predicted and observed effects of warming on fire frequency call into question our present capability to generalize the effect of increasing CO2 levels on fire frequency.”
———————————–but the fact remains that CO2 has increased, and fires and burned areas have decreased.

Not in the timespan where reliable data exists.

I see. So if the data don’t support your beliefs, they’re unreliable. We better start in 1960. Or 1980. And we better ignore the data before then, as that way we can claim there’s been an increase, and because CO2 increased since 1960, we can say CO2 rise and wildfire rise correlate, and because they correlate, CO2 must have caused it. After all, that’s how “climate science” works.

“Analysis of charcoal records in sediments [31] and isotope-ratio records in ice cores [32] suggest that global biomass burning during the past century has been lower than at any time in the past 2000 years.”

(NOTE – in their final paragraph they pay lip service to the fiction that “global warming” will cause more fires in the future, but the fact remains that the drastically increased atmospheric CO2 is so far ONLY correlated with a DECREASE in fires.

All SebH can do is cite the proven liars carbonbrief (see my links on them above). I will not waste any time on their deceit.

You make claims that are unsupportable, and then when asked to support your claims anyway, you provide links to blogscience.

Kenneth, I’ve got news for you. You are blogscience and the bad kind of course … I don’t know if one could even call you guys “amateur scientists”.

I see. So if the data don’t support your beliefs, they’re unreliable. We better start in 1960. Or 1980. And we better ignore the data before then, as that way we can claim there’s been an increase, and because CO2 increased since 1960, we can say CO2 rise and wildfire rise correlate, and because they correlate, CO2 must have caused it. After all, that’s how “climate science” works.

I see … describing how unreliable data is, is the same as ignoring the data. And you call others “blogscience”. Fun times.

Carbon Brief is […]

Serious question Yonason: who do you think you are or what WUWT is? The arbiter of truth? 😉

In addition to the reference I cited above which he did not refute (surprise, surprise),

Yonason, it’s a waste of time refuting your nonsense and besides, you’ll do as you just did here … so what’s the point? In your mind, you’ll always win. You are the second pigeon next to spikey on that pigeon chess board.

All SebH can do is cite the proven liars carbonbrief (see my links on them above). I will not waste any time on their deceit.

Kenneth, I’ve got news for you. You are blogscience and the bad kind of course

Above you claimed that humans are causing global wildfire incidents to increase with their CO2 emissions. You were asked to support this claim/belief. You apparently think you did support this claim/belief by providing a link to the carbonbrief.org blog.

I characterized this response as using blogscience to support your beliefs/claims…and then I proceeded to provide links to peer-reviewed scientific papers published in real scientific journals that said global wildfires have been decreasing in recent decades relative to the last hundreds to thousands of years, meaning that the correlation is CO2 rises and wildfires decline in frequency — the exact opposite of your claim/belief.

A substantive response to the presentation of peer-reviewed scientific papers that do not support, but rather undermine, your claim/belief would be to provide scientific evidence that these scientists citing the decrease in wildfire frequency in recent decades are wrong. Instead, you chose to reply by writing in bold “You are blogscience”, which is the equivalent of responding to a substantive presentation of observational evidence with sophomoric name-calling.

You have offered nothing of substance in this comment thread. All you’ve done is provide a link to a blog with a well-documented history of smearing those who disagree with their zeitgeist.

Earl and Simmonds, 2018https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2017JD027749“We find that there is a strong statistically significant decline in 2001–2016 active fires globally linked to an increase in net primary productivity observed in northern Africa, along with global agricultural expansion and intensification, which generally reduces fire activity.”

And when a paper says, “as evidenced by continued loss of Arctic sea ice”, it shows that they have no interest in actual data. There has been zero trend in Arctic sea ice over the period that the Jet stream has been wavy.

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